Workflow management involves, in part, planning, organizing, securing and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of workflows with respect to specific goals and objectives. A workflow generally includes a sequence of interdependent tasks, where each task is executed following the previous task without delay and ends just before the subsequent task begins. Goals and objectives achievable by a workflow can be provided in a service-level agreement (SLA), which can define, for example, a contracted delivery time of service.
In today's workflow planning, there is a lack of efficient mechanism to model and manage resource demands by workflows. In addition, there is a lack of efficient mechanism to optimize scheduling of workflows to achieve certain business targets. Due to an ever-increasing number of operations-related concerns in today's work environment, there is a great deal of interest in improving these mechanisms. For example, in operations workforce planning, a manger may be concerned with having the appropriate resources available for allocation to the right work groups to deliver certain business-level goals associated with a forecasted volume of work. As another example, in business operations planning, a manager may be concerned with developing an efficient resource allocation plan that allows the business to achieve targeted goals defined by one or more SLAs, even during peak seasonal workloads.